Adrift

Adrift is not exactly be the word, but best fitting at the moment.  I am floating rudderless, bobbing along in a sea of uncertainty.  Do I paddle towards a questionable destination?  Do I wait to see where doing nothing takes me? 


The only explanation I accept for myself is that I am sorting out the events of last year while facing the anniversaries of the same this year.  I am one month shy of my mother's death, a few months shy of my thyroid surgery and my father's death concurrently within the same month.

Enough people have told me that I have accepted it as so, that it does not matter to the degree at which you grieve, only that you grieve.  That each person struggles with the particular events of their life independent of anyone else s example.  What no one has an answer for, is how long or to what extent the grieving process runs.

It has been such this spring, that I smell the warm damp earth of spring, the early geraniums, the bloom of lilacs and an ache of longing for my mother reintroduces me to my beating heart.  I miss a particular corner of my childhood home (yet not the home) that on sunny days put forth the smell of comfort: worked earth, cut grass, roses that in bloom perfumed the line-dried wash.  I am contented, happiest, while working in soil, the memory of my mother's joy there eternal.

The memory of my father is different.  With his death I have come to understand to a degree a being, affected by the early experiences of losses.  I struggle not with the death of the curmudgeonly man of most of my life but with the glimpses of  the potential not fulfilled of a young man with a penchant for mischief, music and dancing.  A man whose mother gave her life in delivering him and his twin brother, followed by the loss of the twin brother at age eleven and the gaining of the oft cliched wicked step-mother.  His death makes me ache to be a better mother to my young sons so that they may grow to confidence in anything they undertake.

My thyroid is significantly smaller in this current scheme, but no less important when I am reminded nightly when taking my synthetic thyroid medication that I am forever indebted to the pharmaceutical entities for my life.    That I no longer possess a piece of myself that I came into this world with, that turned on me, that I had to go under the knife to lose.  But I toe the line at lamenting it for others have lost so much more than I.

I am looking for me and don't know how to begin to find her.  I am no longer a daughter but rather the "mother of" and recognize the responsibility therein but not the direction to get there.

For now I know only that I have distanced myself from so many while I sort it out.  Those who know me, who love me I believe will understand.  They will know it is not personal, rather a journey I must take alone for a while, taking the time to know if I am still capable of navigating this life if left alone.